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King called Golden Years a "novel for television"; it originated as an idea for a novel that sat in King's notebook for years.[1] King "wrote the first five episodes and outlined the last two."[1] King credited Twin Peaks for making it possible for Golden Years to be produced:[1]

"Up until Twin Peaks came on, the only sort of continuing drama that TV understood was soap opera, Dallas, Knots Landing, that sort of thing. To some degree David Lynch gave them that. But he turned the whole idea of that continuing soap opera inside out like a sock. If you think of Twin Peaks as a man, it's a man in delirium, a man spouting stream-of-consciousness stuff. Golden Years is like Twin Peaks without the delirium."

The miniseries was to lead into a regular series, and therefore ended on a cliffhanger. CBS, however, decided not to pick up the option on the full series, and it never realized. King asked for four hours of airtime in the following spring to finish the story, but CBS denied him this.[2] The home video version changes the last few minutes of the final aired episode to give the story an optimistic ending.

An elderly janitor named Harlan Williams (Szarabajka) is caught up in an explosion at the laboratory where he works. After surviving but discovering he is now "aging" in reverse, he ends up on the run from an operative of "The Shop".